Re: Availability

On Fri, Oct 15, 2004 at 02:54:13PM +0100, John Logsdon wrote:
> Erik, Robin, all
> 
> Thanks for the immediate responses.  I was just composing a reply to
> Robin's so I may as well put it all together.
> 
> It is the job and user based accounting that is very interesting in CSA
> but other aspects of the implementation are more complete than the BSD
> version. I will see what happens...

csa will record accounting stats on process exits, but only when the
jobid is non-zero.  You could hack that up quickly.  So far, there
have been a few requests to do that, but it never gets a lot of traction
as it defeats the purpose of job based accounting.  Usually, this type
of accounting is used at large shops that want to attribute resource
usage back to a customer and do not really care about system accounting.

Thanks,
Robin

> 
> At the moment I have grsecurity-based accounting which is process based.
> This has a lot of advantages for looking at individual programs and
> reports elapsed and cpu times by UID, GID, EUID, EGID and parent process.
> I may still retain that - it is hooked in a completely different place to
> BSD so I suspect also to CSA so it shouldn't interfere.  The current grsec
> kernel is 2.4.27 - there are one or two non-grsec security issues that
> fixes over 2.4.26.  Other than the grsec parts, the kernel is vanilla and
> I compile it without modules.
> 
> I don't want to use the 2.6 kernel as yet - while it has advantages for
> example in the scheduler (I am using a Xeon-based box) it is a little too
> early to use on a production system.  Maybe you bleeding-edge guys will
> think differently but I have to be conservative in this application.  So
> the real issue for me is 2.4.x and the .28 kernel is still in pre-release
> phase.  Surely in time the 2.6 kernel will be fine.  I have a little time
> to decide on this - process accounting is not required tomorrow but
> probably before 2.6 takes over completely from 2.4.
> 
> Since CSA requires PAGG, in due course it would be appropriate to combine
> the patches but I guess you can always append the patch files and run it
> in one go.  What's the JOB patch?  I don't see it on the SGI project list.
> (Actually your ftp server seems to hang episodically, particularly on IE).
> 
> Best wishes
> 
> John
> 
> John Logsdon                               "Try to make things as simple
> Quantex Research Ltd, Manchester UK         as possible but not simpler"
> [email protected]              [email protected]
> +44(0)161 445 4951/G:+44(0)7717758675       www.quantex-research.com
> 
> 
> On Fri, 15 Oct 2004, Erik Jacobson wrote:
> 
> > > > The samre remarks for PAGG - which I gather you need for CSA anyway or are
> > > > all the patches required in CSA?  And which PAGG patch anyway?
> > > If you get it working, could you reply to the list with what you needed to
> > > do?  If you get stuck, I can probably lend you a hand over the weekend.
> > 
> > I'm going to let Jay answer this one as he may know the best pairing.  The
> > PAGG patches for the most recent 2.6 kernels are a lot different than the
> > 2.4 patches.
> > 
> > If you were using fairly current 2.6 kernels, we'd just point you at the
> > most recent PAGG and JOB patches.
> > 
> > If it becomes necessary, we can look in to bringing the PAGG patch for 2.4
> > up to speed with what we're doing for 2.6.
> > 
> > --
> > Erik Jacobson - Linux System Software - Silicon Graphics - Eagan, Minnesota
> > 
> 
>